Birds, Spiders, and Toads. Oh my!

Ok, so we live in a neighborhood, but we're out in the country. We've seen a lot of wildlife in our yard this year. Here are a few pictures that we've taken in just the last week alone.

There were two beautiful cardinals being very busy in our back yard. Here's what they were busy doing...

Isn't it a perfect little nest, with one perfect little egg? Wait a minute. Where's the tree? I thought most birds preferred trees for their nests. Apparently not, since this is the second nest we've found in this hanging basket this month. It's sad though. Both times the birds have built their nests, laid their eggs, and not returned. They were different kinds of birds each time. We have some swallows in our front yard using our porch to build a mud nest. They've done this before. We somehow manage to attract birds without trying. We don't feed them or anything. I guess we're just bird lovers at heart and they know it.

On to our next visitor. This spider was going into our garage and I'm really glad someone saw it before it made it further inside. Just look at this thing. It's a monster!

The kids marveled at it for hours. We determined that it wasn't an extremely dangerous spider, but it wasn't very nice either. Robert took the kids to the pond to let it go so it was far, far away. When he got it out of the jar, he said it jumped at him. Very scary! You have to look close to see the spider, but he's in there.

I think we may have an infestation here. We have toads all over our yard. We've left our doors open and found them in our living room and even in my bathroom. It's a little shocking to see one when you're really not expecting it. It's even worse to step on one when you're not expecting it....ewwww! Anyway, they're constantly everywhere in our yard. In fact, I didn't have pictures of any this morning when I decided to write this post and I just went out and found two immediately.

Besides the exciting creepy crawlies I've mentioned, we've also had fun things like a rather large snake, june bugs, fireflies, mosquitoes, mayflies, roly-polys, wasps, etc. Anyway, it's quite interesting to see all the animals and bugs who consider our yard and home their habitat. Where did I get off thinking it was my habitat?!?!